Posted on: Sunday, January 14, 2001
U.S. lifestyles have sweeping effects
By Matt Crenson
National writer for Associated Press
You smell it in Beijing’s Beihai Park, where Chinese families line up to buy buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken. You see it at a Venezuela shopping mall, where Santa Claus hands candy to holiday shoppers. You hear it above the chaos of a Serbian prison riot, as inmates negotiate with their captors by cellular telephone.
On every continent, more and more people are adopting the American consumer lifestyle of convenience and abundance.
Today about 1.2 billion humans — most of them in North America, Europe, Japan and Australia — live on a par with Americans, and the numbers are growing rapidly in other parts of the world.
China, with its long history of famine, now consumes almost half as much meat per capita as Americans do. In increasingly stable Latin America, automobile ownership has doubled since 1986. The per capita Gross Domestic Product of Singapore now rivals that of the United States.
These changes are celebrated and encouraged by U.S. policy-makers who believe that free markets and consumerism can spread democracy and stability to all corners of the globe. But the fast pace of change also brings worries.
Americans, only 5 percent of the world’s population, consume one-fourth of its oil. They use more water and own more cars than anybody else. They waste more food than most people in sub-Saharan Africa eat.
As the rest of the world becomes more like America, will something vital — water, oil, food — simply run out?
Ever since he wrote a book called "The Population Bomb" in 1968, ecologist Paul Ehrlich has argued that the American lifestyle is driving the global ecosystem to the brink of collapse.
"There is not a hope in hell of seeing 10 billion people living on this planet the way Americans do," Ehrlich said. "I don’t think we even want to try."
But others, including the late University of Maryland economist Julian Simon, have argued that Ehrlich couldn’t be more wrong.
It is not resources that limit economic growth and lifestyles, Simon insisted, but human ingenuity.
Back in 1980, the two wagered money on their competing world views. They picked something easily measurable — the value of metals — to put their theories to the test.
Ehrlich predicted that world economic growth would make copper, chrome, nickel, tin and tungsten scarcer, and thus drive the prices up. Simon figured human ingenuity would overcome scarcity, and that the prices would go down.
The payoff was based on how much the value of an imaginary $1,000 stockpile of the metals changed between 1980 and 1990.
If the $1,000 worth of copper, chrome, nickel, tin and tungsten appreciated during the period, Simon would pay Ehrlich the difference. If its value fell, Ehrlich would pay Simon the difference.
Ehrlich lost.
By September 1990 all five metals had decreased in value, and Ehrlich wrote Simon a check for $576.07.
Ehrlich claimed it was a fluke, the result of a global recession that had reduced industrial demand for raw metals.
But Simon argued that the metals decreased in price because superior materials such as plastics, fiber optics and ceramics had been developed to replace them.
"The limits to knowledge are the limits to growth," said Mark Sagoff, an economist and disciple of Simon.
The Ehrlich-Simon argument is actually an old one, and, despite the outcome of their bet, it remains unsettled.
Food
Two centuries ago, Thomas Malthus declared that worldwide famine was inevitable as human population growth outpaced food production.
In 1972, a group of scholars known as the Club of Rome predicted much the same thing for the waning years of the 20th century.
It didn’t happen because — so far, at least — human ingenuity has outpaced population growth.
Fertilizers, pesticides and high-yield crops have more than doubled world food production in the last 40 years. The reason 800 million people go hungry today is not that there isn’t enough food in the world, but that they can’t afford to buy it.
It is not lack of resources that makes people poor today, Sagoff argued. It’s bad government.
He points to Angola, a resource-rich country too wracked by civil war to exploit its wealth, and Russia, comparable to the United States in natural resources and intellectual capital but impoverished by the legacy of communism.
Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel peace prize in 1970 for his role in developing high-yield crops, predicts that genetic engineering and other new technologies will keep food production ahead of population increases over the next half century.
Perhaps not everyone will have all the steak they want, but most experts — even those who have doubts about genetic engineering — agreed that enough food can be produced for the whole world in the 21st century.
Whether everybody will get a fair share is less certain.
The end of nature?
Economist Sagoff may disagree with ecologist Ehrlich about the fate of humanity on a finite planet. But on one point they concur: We are bound to see less of Mother Nature in coming decades.
As more people around the world achieve the American Dream, they will consume more resources and generate more pollution.
Tropical rainforests will be laid low, wildernesses entombed under pavement. Mighty rivers like the Yangtze and the Nile, already dammed and diverted, will become even more canal-like.
"Nature is something that we’re going to have to do without," laments Sagoff, who like his mentor Simon, is a professor at the University of Maryland.
As the new century progresses, fewer and fewer of us will live on the land. Half of humanity will live in "megacities" like Tokyo and Sao Paulo, Brazil — human hives of 12, 15, even 25 million people, experts predict. Untamed nature will exist only in scattered remnants, preserved like artifacts in a museum.
In a way, this is nothing new. It has been the fate of our species since God ejected Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, to live in a world increasingly of our own making.
The automobile
In the last century, Americans transformed 2 percent of their country with pavement — an area the size of Georgia lies under asphalt.
There are three automobiles for every four people in the United States, and as their numbers increase, the less useful they become.
In Los Angeles, the average rush-hour highway speed is 34 mph. In Manila, rush-hour traffic travels at 7 mph.
During the next half-century, most population growth is expected to be in cities of 10 million people or more.
In cities that big, with roads that clogged, cars are a lousy way to get around.
Traffic congestion, dwindling fossil fuel supplies and air pollution are all pushing the car toward extinction, said Clay McShane, an urban historian at Northeastern University in Boston.
Some of those problems could be solved with alternative fuels, pollution-control technologies and intelligent traffic systems. But in the long run, McShane argued, cars just don’t make sense for the megacities of the future.
He expects those cities to look more like today’s Tokyo and New York, with abundant public transportation and densely packed high-rise housing, than today’s Los Angeles and Houston, with their freeways and sprawling suburbs.
Oil
If everybody on Earth consumed as much oil as the average American, the world’s known reserves would be gone in a decade. Even at current rates of consumption, known reserves wouldn’t last the new century.
But experts aren’t worried. New energy technologies, they said, will avert a global energy crisis.
Already, oil companies have developed cheaper ways to find oil and extract it from the ground, effectively extending the supply into the 22nd century.
"We will have oil for a long time to come," said Mike Shanahan, a spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute.
Still, there is a finite amount of oil on the planet, and someday it will be gone. Even before that happens, concerns about global warming may compel the world to stop burning so much fossil fuel.
The energy industry is preparing for that day by investing in technologies that will replace fossil fuels.
Solar, nuclear and wind power are all possibilities, but many experts said the most likely candidate is the fuel cell.
A fuel cell is essentially a hydrogen-powered battery that produces no pollution. Its only byproduct is water.
And, since hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, supply should never be a problem.
"Everything depends on the course of technology," Sagoff said.
Water
The world of the future may not need oil, but without water, humanity couldn’t last more than a few days.
Right now, humans use about half the planet’s accessible supply of renewable, fresh water — the supply regenerated each year and available for human use.
That’s only part of Earth’s total water, excluding things like icecaps, water in inaccessible locations or aquifers too deep to be recharged by rainfall.
A simple doubling of agricultural production with no efficiency improvements would push that fraction to about 85 percent. Unlike fossil fuels, which could eventually be replaced by other energy sources, there is no substitute for water.
Technologies such as desalination, which removes salt from seawater, can be used in rare circumstances.
But removing salt from water takes a lot of energy and so is expensive. In the Persian Gulf, one place that uses desalination, wealth makes it possible — "they can turn oil into water," said Sandra Postel, director of the Global Water Policy Project in Amherst, Mass.
Some regions have already reached their water limits, with massive dams and aqueducts diverting almost every drop of water for human use.
In the U.S. Southwest, the diversion is so complete that by the time the Colorado River reaches its mouth in the Sea of Cortez, it has no water in it.
Much of Los Angeles’ water comes from more than 200 miles away.
More than any other resource, water may limit the expansion of American consumerism during the next century. Or, it could cause more trouble than that.
"In the next century," World Bank Vice President Ismail Serageldin predicted a few years ago, "wars will be fought over water."
The wild card
How many people will be able to live the American way of life 50 years from now? The question is impossible to answer, said Postel, because of one "big wild card" — global warming.
If current trends continue, the Earth’s average surface temperature will be 2.7 to 11 degrees Fahrenheit higher in 100 years, scientists said.
That’s a pretty wide margin — a factor of four. A warming at the lower end of the range might be barely noticeable, perhaps bringing rain instead of snow a few days each winter.
But a warming of 11 degrees would be catastrophic, shifting agricultural regions, threatening species with extinction and pushing tropical diseases into areas where they are currently unknown.
Glaciers would melt and ocean waters would expand, flooding heavily populated, low-lying places like Florida, the Netherlands and Bangladesh.
If that happened, food production would almost certainly decline. Hundreds of millions of people would be driven from their homes by famine, flood and drought.
Billions more would be hard pressed to maintain their current lifestyles, much less aspire to an American standard of living.
Global warming’s effects are expected to be most dramatic in the Arctic and in coastal regions; but beyond that general description, scientists have very little idea how they will be distributed over the globe.
Perhaps some of the world’s greatest cities will be laid low, its most productive bread baskets and fisheries devastated.
"We can say certain things that are likely to happen but we don’t know in most regions exactly what is going to happen," Postel said.
Never mind Botswana and Bangladesh, Cambodia and Cameroon. In 2050, perhaps even people in the United States may not be able to live the way Americans do today.
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